A Study on Physical Layer Security Through Ray Tracing Simulations

Due to its broadcast nature, the wireless channel cannot be really private, i.e. restricted to the intended users only. Rather, it can always be available also to some unauthorized outsider, and, thus, security in wireless communications is crucial. Protection of communications from possible eavesdroppers is usually achieved through standard cryptography schemes, which nonetheless may not always represent the best solution due to their complexity and power consumption. Physical Layer Security, in particular Secret Key Generation, leverages the fading/dispersive properties of the wireless channel to distill encryption keys with limited computational effort. In this study, ray tracing propagation modeling is proposed as a tool to investigate the performance of the physical layer approach to communications security, thanks to its capabilities to model the channel statistics and the more flexibility compared to a measurement campaign.